Online Stores Have Merry Christmas

Data from VeriSign's online payment services indicates that this holiday season was very good to online retailers as sales were up 23% in November alone, and a 24% increase was seen over last season. The electronics and housewares industries led the way this year in sales.

Yahoo! Maps Adds Traffic Features

The Yahoo! Blog describes a new addition to Yahoo! Maps which allows you to get detailed traffic reporting. It's a nice feature, only currently seems to work with larger cities, while Atlanta did show results, Orlando did not, but I would expect the coverage to increase moving forward.

Yahoo! Video Search

A BETA of the Yahoo! Video Search previously announced is up and viewable to the public. My initial impression is this is well done, and the results seemed to be fairly reliable, only videos posted on Blogs seemed to result in dead links. Results were usually pretty accurate and not full of too many duplicates of the same video size.

MSN Messenger Preview Contains Search

The Seattle Post Intelligencer reports MSN Messenger Preview 7.0 contains a search box that allows the instant messenger program's users to quickly launch a web search (using MSN Search of course.) I think we can expect to see search boxes popping up all over the place as the competition between the big 3 players heats up.

MSN Toolbar Suite Beta

Maybe I spoke too soon, or I just have that much sway (yeah, right) but MSN has released the MSN Toolbar Suite Beta. This brings them into the desktop search battle along with Google's offering and the expected release of a Yahoo! version in January. Like Yahoo! this toolbar helps find photos and music in addition to the expected web cached pages, emails and documents on your machine.

Google Adds Major Libraries to Database

CNET News reports that Google is developing plans to add major libraries to its database by working in conjunction with several major libraries; University of Michigan, Oxford University, New York Public Library, Stanford University and Harvard University. For now only selected out of print and some copyrighted works will be scanned in, but as technology and legal issues are worked out expect this project to expand in scope.

Google Suggestion Tool

From the Google labs: Google Suggest may finally give AdWords advertisers an easier way to get insightful data that Overture has for some time now on keyword suggestion. While it doesn't give exact search numbers (rather it provides the amount of results) it does give a quicker and more intuitive interface to the Adwords keyword suggestion tool. This BETA may not be intended for that use, but that's how I'm going to take advantage of it!

Google News Goes International

Google News has expanded to include seven new international versions of the popular news service to provide articles tailored to the inhabitants of Argentina, Chile, French Canada, Mexico, Austria, and two variations for Switzerland.

Yahoo! to Test Desktop Search

CNET News reports that Yahoo! plans to test a rival version of desktop search in January, that will allow users to include personal files such as emails, Word documents, PDFs and more. Differing from Google's current offering, this service will also allow searching for music and image files on a user's machine and eventually will contain support for archival and retrieval of Yahoo! Messenger conversations. The article also mentions that MSN still are working on their own similar service, something they have been speaking on for some time now, but have yet to produce.

Coming Soon: Audio/Visual Search

CNET reports that the top 3 search giants, Google, Yahoo! and MSN are all developing various types of audio visual search features for their users. While the Google project seems to focus more on broadcast television clips, the Yahoo! plan is to implement something more akin to their existing Yahoo! images search. MSN also has in the works something aimed to integrate into the interactive television market, so we should expect to see several new offerings from the "top 3" on the online digital video front in the near future.

Google Doubles Index to More than 8 Million Pages

According to the official Google Blog the index size of the search giant nearly doubled recently, bringing the total page count of their index to more than 8 billion pages. Check out the number at the bottom of the Google homepage and see for yourself.

Google Advertising Professionals

Google seems to be hard at work bringing their advertising branch up to speed with the rest of the paid media world. The recently opened Google Advertising Professionals program is an effort to help the growing group of advertisers and campaign management providers who use Google AdWords en masse to conduct online marketing campaigns. The reported features include an advanced AdWords account to help juggle multiple accounts, free training and resources and even a Qualified Google Advertising Professionsal Logo.

New Google AdWords Features

A couple new features of the Google AdWords PPC system cropped up recently to help advertisers get the most out of their campaigns. Accroding to Google: The Ads Diagnostic Tool "can report the ad position for active ads, and identify why a particular ad or group of ads may not be showing. In those cases where an ad is not shown, this tool provides recommended steps to help you get your ads up and running." Also new are some changes to the AdWords reports area, which now has a number of features including graphs using your data, saved reports, and even automation and scheduling of when to run your reports and notify you via email of the updates. It's good to see the AdWords reports area get an overhaul, as the previous incarnation did seem a bit rough and unfinished compared to top competitor Overture.

Yahoo! Images Search

Looking more and more like Google everyday, Yahoo! recently announced Yahoo! Images Search which works just like the tried and true Google Images Search, and at first glance appears to be just as effective. The only difference I immediately see is that Yahoo boasts over 1 billion images to search from while Google weighs in at a mere 880,000,000. Yahoo! is also promoting the use of this same service via your web enabled phone.

Google Plans Desktop Search Tool for Mac

Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt announced Goolge's plans to create a Mac version of their new Desktop Search Tool at a University of California-Los Angeles conference commemorating the 35th anniversary of the Internet. This is not suprising given the integration of Google Web Search into the Safari browser that comes with the latest Mac operating systems. Full story can be found at CNET News.com

Google Acquires Keyhole Corp.

A recent press release revealed that Google has purchased Keyhole Corp., a 3D digital mapping company. Is it only a matter of time now before Google Local Search starts incorporating 3D mapping? One thing is for sure, Google is definitely making moves to bring search technology into "real world" applications.

Overture's New Budgeting Options

Overture is now offering new features within the money management tab of the Overture DirectTraffic center. Advertisers can now set options that will enable listings to run throughout the entire month, even on a capped monthly budget. Similar to Google AdWords' daily budget, this new service can keep your company listings from being knocked offline until the monthly budget refill date, meaning no extended absences from the PPC ad space. You can learn more with one of Overture's always slick flash tutorials.

Google SMS

After some real world usage of the new Google SMS feature over the weekend I think Google hit something with unlimited potential. Finding a specific restaurant address or even a type of restaurant in my general vicinity was a snap and my answers came to me almost immediately. Essentially this little service lets you get the same Google Local results that appear at the top of any regular Google search that incorporates a location along with keywords right on your cell phone. There's a host of other little tricks, like getting unit conversions and dictionary definitions, and I'm guessing pretty much any of the little known additional features that the Google site already has to offer right through the search box. It will definitely be interesting to see where this might lead.

Google Desktop Search

Google released a startling new Beta version of a desktop search tool that makes searching for files on your hard drive as easy as searching Google. In fact, it's just like searching Google, all the way down to the interface . Integration into your regular Google web searches is the first thing you may notice, now you get sample results for matching local files in the same space you find Google Local and Froogle results. This is most certainly only the tip of the iceberg, the WebmasterWorld Forum is teeming with discussion on all the features and even an attempt to see what can be gleaned from this tool's algorithm and how it may yield secrets to the top secret formula Google uses to rank web pages throughout the internet.

Viewer Behavior and Online News Sites

This site contains a great study that was conducted on how people's eyes traverse across an online news site, how underlined and linked headlines affect how people read the rest of a news item and other useful tidbits. This is a must read for anyone who runs a news oriented site, or any site for that matter.